The Girl With a Bomb in Her Backpack

In the first half of Julia Loktev’s film, Day Night Day Night, there is an expanded, and bizarre, twist on a film device made popular in the ’80s—the geek-to-chic dress-up montage. You know the scene: The music is loud and garishly cheery. The Geek comes out of the dressing room wearing a ridiculous outfit and the Cools shake their heads, and so the Geek moves on to the next outfit and the next until the Cools finally nod and the transformation is complete: The Geek is now chic.

Except in Loktev’s film, the pivotal character isn’t a chess-playing nerd: She’s a suicide bomber—in this case a young woman, whose name we never learn—and the three ski-masked men outfitting her are selecting the perfect getup for her final moments on earth, when she will detonate a bomb in Times Square. They are trying to turn her into the everygirl who won’t stand out in midtown Manhattan—an unnecessary gesture given that the busy square is, after all, home to Naked Cowboy.

As in the rest of the movie, there’s no soundtrack, only the sound of movement; a pink belt being pulled from a plastic shopping bag, the clicking of a door closing, the rustle of the young woman’s pants as she walks back and forth.

The irony of the dress-up scene is that most of this conceptually frightening and tense film is spent showing us just how normal its young subject is, or, at the very least, seems. There are no outward signs that she’s a suicide bomber: No gun-toting or chanting or praying. There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about her and little of her story is ever revealed. Instead long, drawn-out, uncomfortably close camera shots, with elevated volume, show us the mundane things she does—shaving her armpits, blinking in the bathtub, flicking a lamp on and off, and, in one excruciating 30-second shot, clipping her toenails, even the last little piggie. The nearer the camera draws to her, the farther away she seems and the louder the obvious question gets: Why oh why is she doing this?

Only two or three moments in the entire film provide a glimpse of behaviors that would strike anyone as alarming, and even these go unnoticed by onlookers in the world’s most famous intersection. In the film’s opening scene—before she gets off a bus to fulfill her mission—she whispers, “Everybody dies. Some people fall from a window and die. Others die when an air conditioner falls from a window and hits them... Some people are knifed to death, some are shot, some are strangled, some are beaten to death with bare hands….Some people just get old and die. But I’ve made up my mind. I have only one death. I want my death to be for you.” The point is simple: Since everybody dies she might as well die for whatever it is she believes in. In the don’t-tell spirit of the movie, however, we are never told what that is.

Loktev uses a style familiar to other recent topic-driven docudramas, including Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which portrayed a fictional story of a Columbine-like school shooting, and Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, which dramatized that event in Northern Ireland. But those films differ from Loktev’s in that they focus on the “big” events—the shootings, the murders, as well as the unique human moments that led to them. Day Night Day Night avoids them, focusing rather on the minutia, the subtext.

At its best, Day Night Day Night resembles another Van Sant work, Last Days, which re-imagines the hours before musician Kurt Cobain’s suicide, in that these tiny, by-the-wayside moments are the movie. The sound of toenail clippings is the point, and if you can bear to listen you’ll finish the film having gained some insight into the mind of this suicide bomber. If you can’t, your local Blockbuster has copies of Paradise Now, a more conventional film about suicide bombers.

The film’s obvious lesson, which Loktev succeeds in sinking into viewers’ heads without shoving it in their faces, is that trying to stop a suicide bomber once she’s been accessorized with explosives is essentially hopeless. And by the time you recognize her as an attacker, it’s too late. Until then, she looks and acts like you and me, and, without the bomb on her back, she is like you and me. Only in the last moments before she prepares to press “the button,” do we glean the difference between her and any other ethnically ambiguous girl walking around Times Square. She is scared to death. And wouldn’t you be?
—Shaun Raviv